Artificial intelligence-accelerated high-throughput screening of antibiotic combinations on a microfluidic combinatorial droplet system

Microfluidic platforms have been employed as an effective tool for drug screening and exhibit the advantages of lower reagent consumption, higher throughput and a higher degree of automation. Despite the great advancement, it remains challenging to screen complex antibiotic combinations in a simple, high-throughput and systematic manner. Meanwhile, the large amounts of datasets generated during the screening process generally outpace the abilities of the conventional manual or semi-automatic data analysis. To address these issues, we propose an artificial intelligence-accelerated high-throughput combinatorial drug evaluation system (AI-HTCDES), which not only allows high-throughput production of antibiotic combinations with varying concentrations, but can also automatically analyze the dynamic growth of bacteria under the action of different antibiotic combinations. Based on this system, several antibiotic combinations displaying an additive effect are discovered, and the dosage regimens of each component in the combinations are determined. This strategy not only provides useful guidance in the clinical use of antibiotic combination therapy and personalized medicine, but also offers a promising tool for the combinatorial screenings of other medicines.